Being a Washington DC and Annapolis Wedding Photographer, I constantly tell my clients the importance of printing your images, whether loose prints or in album format.  Heck, my two most popular wedding packages include a custom Heirloom Wedding Album! So, I recently decided that I needed to start practicing what I preach and actually PRINT MY IMAGES!!!

There are a few sessions/ time frames that I decided I was doing to use the Artifact Uprising Volumes albums for and so since I have now had two of them printed and have had a chance to go through them I decided I would review them.  I will go through both the pros and cons, in my opinion, of the process and actual albums below to give a comprehensive review.

Pros:

1. You can pull images from whenever/ wherever, as long as they are in an album on your phone. The first album I wanted to make was from my husband’s deployment and homecoming in 2014/2015 and this allowed me to do just that!
2. The Albums are a good size if you prefer an hardcover actual album style and plan to have multiple albums. I chose the Legacy Book, I like that they are hardcover, a cohesive color palette to choose from and the option to have a title embossed on the cover.
3. The images are automatically put into chronological order.  No guess on which images came first- it does it for you!
4. The pages are thick, lay flat pages.
5. There are 50 images in each album, if you have more than 50 images, say 150, it will design 3 albums- one album per 50 images.
6. Price: I believe the price is now $59.99, which is $20 higher than the first Volume I purchased but still a pretty good price.

 

Cons:

1. Changing the colors for each individual album can be a little confusing with their app layout.  Its not very clear as to where to change it and doesn’t prompt you to confirm the color before checkout.
2. There is no way to change the text on the binding of the album, it will simply display the month and year of the first image.  I guess this is the point of Volumes, to keep them in chronological order, but for someone like me who wanted to use it for a couple specific sets of images I would have preferred the option to change that.
3. The images cover the entire page, there is no design to it at all, you can adjust the crop of your images, but they will be square and fit the whole page.
4. Color rendering may be a little darker than the original image.  I knew this going in so I purposefully overexposed the images a touch before pulling them into the iPhone album I wanted to use for the Volume.
5. The Volume albums are not printed as they are ordered.  They are batch printed when they receive a set number of orders.  This means that you could be waiting weeks for your album.
6. Because of the batch printing, quality control isn’t at the highest.  The very first album I received had damaged linen on the cover as well as crooked cutting of the pages.  The replacement, while better isn’t perfect.  I did however order another album of our Anniversary Session in Hawaii, so it obviously didn’t hinder my decision too much.

Overall, I think these are good albums and I will continue to order them for certain things.  I also use Artifact Uprising for my yearly Family Yearbooks.  I use their Hardcover Photobook for this and it comes with a dustcover.  Because I wanted a more “yearbook” style, I chose the h\Hardcover Photobook for that reason, so it does not have lay flat pages but I love it! Review on that coming eventually!